InDesign Tips and Tricks — How to Hang Quotes

May 4, 2017

I think all designers are innately perfectionists which is probably not entirely healthy.

That said, there are a lot of typography missteps that make me cringe when I see them. (See my earlier post on the subject.) One type faux pas that is particularly irksome is the lack of hanging quotes. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, I’ll give you an example so that you can be tortured like me. Haha.

To illustrate my point, I’m going to use a quote from the amazingly awesome Morrissey of my favorite band The Smiths.

The first quote doesn’t have the quotation marks hung outside the left aligned type but the second quote does. See how much nicer the second version looks?

So if you’re a perfectionist like me and want to hang your quotes, there are two easy ways to do that in InDesign.

First, you can click on Window and Type & Tables, then Story. Check the box next to Optical Margin Alignment and POOF! Hanging quotes.

The second option is a really handy little doohickey called a “pipe.” There may be another name for it but the designer who unearthed this little formatting gem for me called it a pipe so that’s what I’m sticking with. It kind of looks like a sword, but whatever. To make use of the pipe, you simply put your cursor just inside the quotation mark and hit Command and \. Voila!

I sometimes use a pipe when I just want to quickly set up my own bullets or numbering rather than use InDesign’s bullets and numbers function.

So that’s it. Now you know how to hang your quotes. You have no more excuses! 😉

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